Pull yourself out from under that rock. I'm not talking about that silly little shindig; I'm talking about a different 150th!

That's right; this year, Anna's Taqueria is celebrating their 150th deciyear!

(You can groan, now.)

MIT is a fairly unique school when it comes to on-campus dining options; there's a huge cooking culture in many of the dorms, as students are not required to join the campus meal plan (although don't worry, parents and the I-have-to-buy-groceries?-type : there are dining dorms with dining halls and that nice ol' traditional mandatory-dining-plan that you know and love from all those other schools you've visited). However, when it comes to quick food at minimal investment and effort to yourself, I still think MIT's the place that can't be beat; the majority of my confidence in that statement comes from the friendly little place under the Student Center steps.

I don't know why the lighting in this photo is so abysmal. I had an unsuccessful photo-day. Oh well, pretend it looks warm and inviting.

For Chipotle lovers and strangers to Mexican food alike, I have but this to say: you have to try a burrito from Anna's. If you're up for it, it's a delicious experience for the mind, the mouth, and the wallet. I had never had a burrito until my junior (or senior? I forget; Michelle, do you remember?) year of high school, when my friend Michelle dragged me to the also-fairly-delicious Felipe's Taqueria in Harvard Square. In fact, I don't think I'd ever had any sort of Mexican food beyond the occasional "taco day" at my middle school's cafeteria, and that really shouldn't count. Shortly after, I tried my first burrito at Anna's, and since that day I've been hooked. MIT students frequently compare the addictiveness of an Anna's burrito to that of certain Schedule II drugs; in a nutshell, once you pop, the fun is burrito.

I wouldn't normally include close-up shots of food, as I think they're quite overused; however, in a blogpost about the art of the burrito, I found myself lacking for other sources of graphic content. Also, how am I supposed to center captions with this newfangled WYSIWYG editor? Gone are the days of WYGIWYG :( And why doesn't this burrito look as appetizing in this picture as it does in real life? I guess I'm new to this food photography dealio which I normally mock. The length of this caption makes me feel like Chuck Lorre.

Since then, I'll try a burrito anywhere I go; I jump at any chance to travel, and so far I have yet to find a burrito more tasty and well-made than what I can get from the little taqueria right in MIT's front yard. For $4.50, you can get a more-than-filling lunch with not-quite-all the fixin's; for $0.75 extra, you can supersize it. They offer whole wheat tortillas, spicy sauces for chicken and steak, and more exotic meats like lengua (cow tongue) which seem to scare most of my friends away (my verdict: decent, but I far prefer the steak and salsa roja). Also, since the burritos are so well-priced and quickly available, they become a staple of my diet during the parts of the year where I can't find the time to cook for myself. On top of that, with grains, meats, proteins, and vegetables, I think those burritos are singlehandedly responsible for balancing my diet.

But this is something anybody can experience, any day of the year, when they come to MIT. What prompted me to post this? What's so special about right now, and why should you drop everything you're doing and come to visit MIT in just 4 weeks (and change)?!

Why, to celebrate Anna's 15(0)th anniversary, of course! Fifteen years old and going strong, Anna's is giving away free things on the 15th of each month! (Hey MIT: why no free things on the 150th of each month? Hrm?)

In other words, my dinner tonight came with a free glass of a delicious Mexican drink: horchata. The perfect thing to cool down the spicy taste of that steak and salsa roja burrito, with a whole wheat tortilla, rice, beans, lettuce, salsa, and cheese. So, come visit MIT, and while you're here make sure to try a burrito from Anna's!

Also, hm. This website looks different... did I miss something?

-Cam

[1] Who'd have thought MIT doesn't own the rights to Calvin and Hobbes? Hmph. Guess I'll just have to reference the comic strip awkwardly inline.

As fun as it is to play outside, the time-honored sport of crufting (see: crvfting) is an important part of daily life at MIT.

Although you can easily furnish your dorm room with exquisite, handcrafted Scandinavian furniture from your favorite importer...

(I got a new bookshelf! I have a massive summer reading list that I cooked up... although it is strangely almost all nonfiction. *shrug*, guess I'm old...

Or very original, high-quality lighting from your local upscale retailer...

Target, okay?

You can also easily furnish your room with much more unique furniture, with significantly more dings and dents, from another great source.

MIT!

Quoth my friend Kevin upon learning of this: "That's not fair."

Many schools and companies (arguably, that's redundant) don't like to give up their stuff. I've asked for old computers and furniture from a number of such entities (cough, cough, Microsoft, VMware, other such companies...), and they all have stringent policies about when they can give away things they're getting rid of. Most companies end up sending piles and piles of perfectly functional furniture, cat food, used clothing and computers straight to the trash heap. Guess who doesn't?

MIT!

Well, mostly. MIT still throws out a great number of things. However, there's one place of refuge for discarded stuff (cruft) at MIT; that wonderful place is known on these hallowed grounds as "reuse".

Looking around my room and my hall, here are a few examples of things we've picked up off of reuse in the last two years:

• Several refrigerators
• Several air conditioners
• One 138 gallon bow-front glass aquarium
• Many smaller aquariums...
• One cat
• Toner for my 15? year old printer, which is still going strong!
• Bar-height stools (for my standing desk. and for other things)
• Four comfy couches
• Three weird freshmen
• Two queen size beds
• And a partridge in a pear tree!

Maybe I got a bit carried away at the end, there. We didn't actually pick up three freshmen, or a partridge in a pear tree. However, we did collect a nine foot tall cactus named Bubba. Yes, I'm serious.

And to think that companies would throw out things like this! The waste is appalling. (Yes, I did just imply that large corporations may throw out cats. Accidental implication? ...Perhaps.)

Obtaining such things is often made easier by my dear friend Lucy; however, even with a huge honkin' SUV to cart things around, obtaining goods from reuse often means climbing through dirty, dusty, greasy piles of cruft to find the gems that make their way back to our dorm. And that's why a good day is often a day when, at the end, you're covered in grease, scrapes, and sweat.

(The aforementioned Kevin, a high school friend who goes to a perhaps more wasteful university, and I obtained these twenty two computers the other day; if I actually get my butt out of this chair and do some cool projects this summer, then stay tuned for a blog post about DIY supercomputing[2]! If I don't get my butt out of this chair, then I guess it's business as usual...)

[2] Probably not involving anything like Map Reduce; I just wanted a nice title.

Happy summer!

-Cam

[3] ... yes, those are my legs in bed, pointing towards the computer pile. Is that appropriate for the MIT Admissions blogs? ... *shrug*. I'm wearing covers, at least.

[4] By the way, for those of you who'd been asking about the name of the cat in the pictures I'd posted a few months ago... I got an e-mail the other day:

------------

From: Vincent
To: Cam
Subject: blog

i just happened to look at your mitadmissions blog

for the record, i also call my cat cat. her given name is geneva. and the only "name" she might respond to would be kissing noises.

lol.

Also, a clue to the answer to the title of this entry.

If you haven't thrown up yet, hang on. My friends from high school are starting to come back to Boston for the summer, and my punny ways are a lot stronger when I'm around them; this entry is proof that a post could be hazardous to your mental health.

If you walk into it.

Did you see that coming? Well, too bad. That will only make the rest of this worse.

Before I get fired for writing a blog post containing only puns, however, allow me to write some content.

The answer to my riddle: It takes about 8000 engineers to change a (metaphorical) light bulb; 12 to play with the iPad (sigh), a few hundred for the fanfare, and a few thousand more to watch, eat cookies, and clap a lot.

I'm talking about the MIT 150 convocation! The subject of several recent entries (see below), MIT is currently celebrating its 150th anniversary; it's an awesome time to be in, at, and around MIT. There's all kinds of art, celebration, and other shindig going on; if you've been living under a blogrock (like a normal rock, but blog) recently, though, here's a few examples:

• A flash mob!
• An open house!
• A dude with a yo-yo!
• Art! Oh boy. I'm a little less excited about the art as a whole because every piece of MIT150 art around campus seems to be in white. Could we have had some color? Grumble, grumble, grumble...*
• and other historical goodness (I dig the pictures)
• And something shiny tonight that will likely end up in the blogs... stay tuned!

Oh, and a Mood Meter:
Happy yet? Maybe more links will help!

A little while ago some friends and I decided to go play some late night ping pong; we were surprised to stumble upon another large group of people, staying up late and being generally happy in the media lab:

Har, har.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand: the circus!

My way of saying that ceremonial robes look silly.

MIT's 150th convocation was held at Boston's Convention and Exhibition Center; all morning, there were buses leaving from all over campus to take people there for the big event. When we got there, we filed into the biggest auditorium I'd ever seen - I think it could've doubled as an aircraft hangar. There were rows of seats for as far as the zoom lens could see.

After we sat down, we were treated to music by Rambax, MIT's Senegalese drumming ensemble, and several of MIT's orchestral / other music groups whose names I couldn't recall. When it seemed that the crowds had mostly stopped arriving, we were greeted by a video on the absolutely giant display, talking briefly about MIT's history of innovation while pictures of MIT through the ages flashed by.

The convocation ceremony (which, from the Latin, I take to mean "assembly", more or less, but from the event, I take to mean "assembly for the renewal of a charter"?) consisted of speeches from several important and awesome figures in recent MIT history; we heard from the Chairman of the MIT Corporation, current Institvte President Svsan Hockfield, The Honorable David S. Ferriero -- 10th Archivist of the United States, who came to us with a special message from his boss...

I'm pretty sure he said his boss was one of these guys. Unless they're one and the same?

We listened to six more presenters after that, among them MIT Institvte Professor and Nobel Prize winner Phillip A. Sharp; however, the one who left the strongest impression on me was Institvte Professor Sheila E. Widnall, also one of two (if I recall correctly) United States Secretaries of the Air Force from MIT. As somebody who's long wanted to learn to fly and is looking at taking pilot lessons over the summer, I was particularly impressed when she told us that she could fly every plane owned by the U.S. Air Force -- as long as it had a passenger seat :-P -- and that she'd been up in a U2 spy plane.

After all those presentations, President Svsan brought out the new charter for MIT, to be signed by twelve Important Persons.

There was, however, one major disappointment at the ceremony.

They signed it using an iPad.

sigh.

Afterwards, we gathered for ceremoniously large cookies (like 6" diameter -- seriously, ceremoniously large, right?) and other snacks. I stopped to take a picture of some particularly bright tulips:

shrug, they were pretty. I don't know. Blog relevance? None!

And then left.

So, now what? Well, now that the metaphorical lantern has been replaced by a low-power LED controlled by an iPad, and the necessary 8000 or so engineers have gathered to ensure that the replacement occurred without a hitch, I guess it's on to the next one hundred and fifty years. Right?

But first, the next one hundred and fifty psets due before finals. Adios!

Schwag. And a pset.

PS: If you're curious as to where all the puns went: I wrote the first part of this after hanging out with the aforementioned high school friends; I wrote the second part after having not seen them for a few days. Ah, well. More puns next time!

I assume that the bulk of our audience right now is students who are thinking about joining the class of 2015, and/or those admitted who don't mind the expense of traveling to boston for the weekend in exchange for free food. Which is totally an okay thing to do, by the way. When Olin College of Engineering asked me if I wanted to attend their candidates' weekend, an event similar to CPW with the major difference that the attendees have not been and will not all be admitted (in my mind, I viewed it as elimination round 2, and was hoping for Survivor-esque challenges during the weekend), I gave them an answer that somewhat sealed my fate. They were running out of space for Candidate's Weekend, and so basically asked me "would you like to be considered for a spot, or have you made a decision to go elsewhere?" I had been accepted to MIT about three weeks prior, and my decision was only between MIT and Olin; I asked my friends at Olin about Candidates' Weekend and sent the administrative d00d something along the lines of the following:

"Well, I am leaning towards attending MIT, but I'd like to attend CW if possible. I heard we get to make really cool t-shirts*. I'd like to go, but if there's somebody who is not leaning towards MIT, I don't want to take their spot"

* I do not think this sentence, or anything resembling it, was in my actual e-mail; however, it was on the tip of my tongue at the time.

That was an absolutely stupid thing of me to do, but I guess it reflects the state of my mind at that point in my senior year; I believed I was torn between Olin and MIT, but subconsciously had selected MIT from the moment of my acceptance. Fortunately, they saw that I wasn't a good fit for Olin / probably not going to go, and gave the spot to someone else; I was that much sadder for my lack of awesome t-shirts.

However, I have good news about MIT! If you're coming to CPW, you *can* do this! Come, take our free t-shirts, take our food! Take the class of 2014! We ask nothing in return except that you have an awesome weekend. (Fine, you can't actually take the class of 2014. I think they might object to that.)

Still looking for a good reason to be excited SCRATCH THAT I MEAN ABSOLUTELY PUMPED about CPW?

For reasons that make me no less of a manly man, I happened to have two stuffed animals on my bed, conveniently placed in the following arrangement; working at my desk one afternoon, I turned around to observe the following. I present to you: 9000 reasons to come to CPW!

Yes, once again, I am schmoozing you (and incorrectly using that word; please don't send Chris Hansen and an NBC camera crew after me) with pictures of Vincent's cat. I still don't know its name; I still call it 'cat'.

By the following metrics, this picture is 9000 reasons to come to CPW:

1. A picture is arbitrarily worth 1000 words.


2. A cat is supposed to have nine lives; we postulate that these increase ninefold the value of a single cat and items relating to the aforementioned cat.


3. For their cuteness, captionability, and utility in monorail transportation systems, cats and pictures thereof are the Supreme Currency of These Here Internets

In Internet Currency, this is 9000 reasons! Combined with the other reasons given in this post (which you most definitely read, rather than choosing to skip down immediately to the picture of fuzzy cuteness, right?), that makes for Over 9000 Reasons -- the Cardinal Intraweb Number -- to be wanting-to-be-at-CPW.

SO WHY AREN'T YOU HERE YET?

...

See you this weekend!

That's an answer too long and boring for this post (and for maybe any post; the last few months have been either a) pretty nonexciting, b) nonexciting to people who don't care about operating systems research and development, c) exciting, by which I mean "Stargate SG-1 only has two days left on Hulu!", or d) all of the above). However, here is an apology blog post, complete with interesting topic and colorful pictures! Also, something or other about MIT, because that's my job, right?

Also, true to form, I have returned bringing you something of a double (or triple -- slightly debatable) pun in the title and subtext. For starters, and for something MIT-related, let's talk about Splash.

Splash is a pretty cool program that MIT runs every year (biannually, I think?); by 'MIT', I mean my friend Michele and a few of her cohorts in the Educational Studies Program office -- which is student-run, woot woot -- and by 'pretty cool', I mean this:

Splash is a program lasting for one weekend where MIT students can teach /almost/ anything, and high / junior high school students can learn less than or equal to /almost/ anything. It's a pretty cool program to consider when in high school; although I wouldn't recommend taking it as a program to pad your MIT application (something I get asked about far too often >_<), I would recommend taking it as an awesome experience. My friend Maysarah, from my (local) high school attended it once; he came back with a ton of exciting stories and a duct-tape tophat (and more, but my memory's going -- you know, once you turn 19 it all goes downhill). This means he obviously took classes more interesting than mine.

My classes, I say? What, do you ask, do I mean by that? Also, what do I mean by the last two sentences with their overloaded ugly grammatical structure? Good question. Well, this year, I kicked myself into shape in time to fill out the teacher application form for Splash, and decided to teach two classes. The ensuing disaster played out something like this:

Class 1: Beat Me at Kirby's Avalanche!
In high school, I used the ZSNES emulator to play the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game Kirby's Avalanche. I played it with three or four friends, and got pretty good at it. A game always (rather loosely) compared to Tetris when one first sees it, it involves creating combinations of falling, popping blocks to drop more blocks on your opponent's screen. It looks something like this:

And the class was something like this:

(Ok, not exactly like that, but that image came up in my google search and I decided to use it). The Splash program gave me the money to buy a SNES console with two controllers, a copy of Kirby's Avalanche, and several pounds of assorted candies. For an hour, I battled any challengers who wanted to take me on for a shot at winning a prize, and at the end the two people to beat me walked away with the grand prize of the SNES and game and the second prize of all the extra candy. I had an awesome time teaching and playing the game, and a more awesome time losing.

Class 2: Pointers on Pointers
This class was a little more academic; having just taken MIT's 6.828 this fall (maybe more on that later; it's the one class I've taken here so far (the rest being mostly requirements) that I actually *really* cared about and was interested in). 6.828 is MIT's junior/senior/graduate/something level operating systems course; we spend the semester studying, reading about, and developing operating systems. After a semester of that class, I was fully brushed up on my C-fu (C, the programming language) and wanted to share my enthusiasm for the awesome construct that is the memory pointer. The class began with an intro to variables in programming and memory, and ended with development of a stack tracing program for Linux and an out-of-time overview of fun things to do with function pointers. If that all sounded like gobbledegook, the moral of the story is: I have this awesome but extremely geeky interest, and for an hour a classroom full of high school students both wanted to and did sit and listen to me talk about it, and hopefully they had fun.

Now, that was Splash; time to talk about my most recent splash (har, har): an experiment in the physics of waves*.

*(apparently, moving an almost-full fish tank on the top shelf of a wheeled shelving unit can lead to several gallons of slimy, fish-solution-treated water splashing onto you and your clothes)

Starring:

Tiny guppy #1!

Tiny guppy#2!

Two dalmatian mollies!

Two SWEET tiger platies!

And various plants.

Yep. I got fish. Not as exciting as I'm making it seem, but I love it; for better or for worse, I find them about as equally mesmerizing as TV. Eventually, I'll have more fish in the tank, but right now it's still developing a stable population of necessary bacteria... yada, yada, yada, too soon. (For the aquarium lovers among you: any suggestions for more freshwater fish for a 29G?) The awesome part, though, is that I'm allowed to keep these fish in my dorm. Not only that; we're allowed to keep cats. I love living in a dorm with pets, because when everybody's gone to sleep and you find yourself still awake and still working during the witching hour, they're incredible company. It's incredibly soothing to have something moving and alive in your room at all times -- e.g. fish -- and incredibly more soothing to have something nuzzling your foot when all other life around you has retired for the night *(ok, maybe only if that something is a cute, fuzzy, cat/dog/other pet). One reason I really like my dorm at MIT.

Which is why I'll just end with this: meet my friend, Cat.

Introducing the world's first-ever* joint MIT admissions blog post! Brought to you by bloggers Canna H. and Am T. and a pair of mouse ears.

*Backed by absolutely no research or factual evidence.

Also, Happy Halloween, everybody!

Cam:
First, we have a Halloween story. There are two things scary on Halloween: college applications and cats. College application cats. Also, last night we discovered a new qualification for becoming an MIT admissions blogger: you must be scared of the dark. Bold, courageous students need not apply.

Last night, after the requisite parties, pumpkin drop (pumpkins falling from the tallest building in Cambridge -- always a fun event), and various other shenanigans, I met up with Anna and the aforementioned Lucy to go for a drive. Driving by muscle memory led us to Wayland, my small, moderately nowhere-ish hometown. Surprise discovery: nostalgia isn't nearly as enjoyable when you're talking about scary movies on a cold, dark Halloween night.

Anna:
Now, picture this: Cam and I, in a car, in your stereotypical scary movie setting. An intersection in middle-of-nowhere suburbia, at 3am. Power lines and a small rickety corner store.

The headlights fell on a cute little kitty who jumped off the front porch and padded down the sidewalk – so, appropriately, I squealed “CUTE KITTY” and pointed. As Cam glanced over, the cute little kitty snapped its head around and two evil, glowing orange eyes fell on us.

I am not making this up. Glowing orange. There was no doubt that they were pure evil. Cue the following dialogue:

Cam: GAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
Anna: BWAAAHHHHH AHHHHHHHHH
Cam: GYEAAAAAHHHHH
Anna: WAHHHH AHHH AHHHHH

We were out of there like a shot. Being adventurous and exploring the outskirts of civilization suddenly seemed much less appealing when there were clearly demon cats out and about.

Cam:
I think that if it were just a tiny bit colder, I would've burned rubber. We peeled out of there like the city-slickers we apparently are, and decided to head for warmer climates for the summe... er, to more well-lit, people-filled places for the night. You'll have to excuse me; sometimes I mix up bloggers with migrating birds. Anyway, the rest of the night saw us to IHOP, with apparently half of MIT and various drunken partygoers, back to campus, briefly to Wellesley College, and then home safe by the gentle hour of 6:30AM.

All this, dear readers, to bring you entertainment and distraction in your final hours. Look at what we do for you. We almost fell prey to a demon-cat.

...moving on.

Anna:
I would like to mention that all of the "rest of the night" activities Cam listed were carried out with much shivering (about 90% terror and 10% cold), much laughter (90% terror and 10% our own jokes), and much appreciation for the company of other people (Cam: especially 1) the state trooper at IHOP and 2) friends we ran into there). I would also like to add to that list of "rest of the night" activities by saying that, at 5:55am, I turned 18.

Last year, my first post-birthday act was to hit the "submit" button on my Early Action applications.

Cam:
INTERRUPTING BLOGGER WHO? Wait, I messed up that joke. Whatever. So, at the start of this post (which we are writing using VNC - computer screen and keyboard/mouse sharing), Anna and I were debating how to transition from college stories to cat applications, or some amalgamation of those, and she suggested using the cheesy segway: "Speaking of scary things," to which I responded with much glee, mostly because I wanted to use a cheesy pun (double-pun intended). However, I see now that Anna is committing the crime of writing well and with smooth transitions, which deprives me of my basic right to punnery. Curse you, Anna (kidding).

[Retroactive edit]
Disclaimer: We're about to launch into a long-ish section on college applications; what we've written below is just the perspective of two long-winded MIT students, and not of the MIT admissions office. Please take it with several moles of salt, and maybe some pepper (that is to say: it's just our opinion, and we have no bearing on the admissions process).

Anna:
...Now that my brainstorming process has been exposed, I'm going to continue off my final choice of segue. In case you were distracted by the seg(ue/way), cheesy, and pun pictures, let me redirect your attention to what this post was actually supposed to be about. You have a little over 24 hours to submit your application, which probably means that you either a) have submitted it, or b) are fervently re-reading every word, making sure it's all perfect, and double-checking that you did, in fact, tick the right gender (that's the last thing I checked on mine).

There's something I'd like to say about editing, which is that I think it's possible to over-edit. By "over-edit" I mean edit out your natural voice, for the sake of producing a piece of grammatical, spellastic* perfection.

*adjectival version of "spelling" provided by Daniel '12, a fellow French House-er.

That's not to say that you shouldn't check for typos, or careless basic grammatical mistakes. It is to say that your tone of voice is what makes the essay sound like you, and I think that the three-dimensional you, quirks and all, is a lot more precious than a two-dimensional, flawless piece of paper.

Towards the end of the essay-editing process, I asked some pairs of fresh eyes (in the form of family and close friends) to take a look at my essays, taking care to stay away from people who might know a great deal about writing essays but not much at all about me. I didn’t ask them whether my writing was “perfect”, or whether it sounded particularly intellectual, but rather whether it sounded like me. The best feelings came from the “haha! Yes! This sounds exactly like you!” comments.

As the clock ticked to 10:55am (London time) I scanned over the essays once more, feeling satisfied that I had genuinely gotten the essence of myself across. At 10:55, I turned 17, and hit the “submit” button. I then went outside, hung out with some friends, and relaxed.

And was lucky enough not to run into any demon cats.

Cam:
I'd like to take a second here to talk about something along similar lines. This summer, a friend from my high school was texting me (hello 21st century kids: try calling, sometime... text messages are not as good for conversation. grumble, grumble, grumble) asking about MIT, and I suggested she come into the city and we talk about it / do a short tour of the campus, my dormitory, etc. She came with a list of questions that her parents wanted her to ask "an MIT student", but also some that she had for me personally. I think what bothered me most -- not about her questions specifically, but about the larger attitude that many people have towards college applications, of which her questions reminded me -- was that the questions were in large part about what an application "should be".

There is no "should be" college application. You don't need to be writing about your 4.0 GPA, your cure for the common cold, or the impressive roles you've held in your long list of significant extracurricular activities.

There is no "must-join" club for college applications, there is no "must-have" GPA; what matters is that you had passions, you followed them, and in them you found success -- or failure.

My last-minute advice would be: do not focus your application on what you think it should have -- if you think MIT cares a lot about math, and you spent a week on the math team in sophomore year (cough, cough, me), don't prioritize that on your application over the many hours you spent reading and writing science fiction (or whatever you may have done) after school. If you're deciding what to prune from a too-long application, or choosing what goes on which list, then: focus your application on the things that matter most to you, whether they're conventionally "impressive" or not, and through that you will shine.

I guess how this applies to early action applicants right now is how it applied to me when I was finishing up my application; I'd written four different "big essays" for the essay question, on two or three different topics (there was some overlap); in the end, I chose the one that I cared most about, and I think that was the most important choice. The choice wasn't the essay with the best sentence structure and variation, or the most spellastic essay, but rather the one that I was most driven to write.

Anna:
A final word from us: good luck, don’t stress too much, and Happy Halloween!

Wild blogger, hard at work in its natural habitat.

But first, an interesting remark: I said "BRB, homework", and it took a week. That's not unusual, for MIT; running into consecutive deadline after deadline until you don't know what happened to your week. Fortunately, it's not most weeks of the term that you have such an experience; if you plan your schedule right, those weeks are far enough apart that it's worth it.

So, now, a post about keeping a car in the city.

I love to drive; I've for a long time been very comfortable behind the wheel, and I relax most when I'm listening to the radio and driving (in a still-fully-attentive sorta way). I've grown up on the stations in MA; my presets are ordered such that 104.1 is between 93.7 and 100.7. If that makes no sense, you haven't been living in MA quite long enough :)

I've had my share of driving mishaps, but nothing too egregious; before coming to MIT, I had one ticket to my name and one towing. It was little enough that I decided I would try to bring my car here and keep it in the city. However, MIT parking is prohibitively expensive, with good reason: space is limited in the city, and MIT's priority is to provide spaces for commuting faculty. It's not in their best interests to have students driving from East Campus to LaVerdes, after all; however, in the cold of winter, or the near-flash floods of September, some students such as myself like to be able to run errands in moderate comfort. Plus, it's nice to only go grocery shopping once every other week rather than twice a week, because a car lets me carry back far too many gallons of orange juice.

That's not all I keep the car around for; having moved twice this summer (!!), it's almost a necessity to be able to drive to and from my house on my own schedule. And when a friend suggests a trip to Maker Faire NYC, it's more fun to split the cost of gas than it is to pay to sit for four hours on a bus (more on that to come). I've also been known to make many a 5am trip to a local IHOP (about which I suspect one certain commenter will have something to say (cough cough Amy)). Instead of paying for MIT parking, though, I keep my car on the street.

It's a bit of a dance, avoiding parking tickets; knowing what days they do street sweeping, knowing which spots will be free at which hours, and knowing where to park your car between safe periods. Most of the time, I can make it work out, but I think it requires a certain lifestyle that not everybody is willing to have.

Sometimes, I can't. I was originally planning on finishing this post on Wednesday. Between a work deadline and the start of my next assignment, however, something came up.

I was heading to my car to drive to the mall when, thirty feet away, I see a different car parked in the spot. Immediately I stopped and turned around, $140 lighter.

Things I should put on my calendar: street sweeping.

It wasn't all bad, however; I got to hop on my shiny new bicycle (thanks, Microsoft! For paying for near half of it, anyway) and ride into Allston to pick up my vehicle, cash in hand. Since I'd been itching to get in some time on the new bike before the cold really sets in, I was moderately grateful; on top of that, I found a voucher for $50 in my rain coat pocket that I'd lost seven months ago! It reminded me a little bit of the episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry discovers he always breaks even, minus $90 from my savings account. Oh well. I paid the $115 for my car, put my bike in the back (another reason I love my '98 Ford Explorer), and drove home (MIT, that is; home would've been 10 minutes further in a different direction).

By the way, the other $25 of the $140? That comes from one of the greatest scams in the area: DCR parking tickets. If you get a parking ticket from the Department of Conservation and Recreation, you'd better hope you can find a checkbook; if not, you're screwed. Although most parking tickets in Cambridge are handled by the city and can be paid over the phone or online with a credit card, parking tickets on Memorial Drive are handled by the *state*. If you get towed on a state road, then after you pay for your car you get that wonderful Christmas-morning feeling when you see the parking ticket on your windshield in the tow lot. The state must still be programming their systems with punchcards, too, because not only do you have to pay this ticket in cash -- if you don't have a checkbook, that is, or can't find it -- you have to pay it in person, at an office with very little parking nearby before 4PM on a weekday. This means you have to somehow get over there on foot, before 4PM -- as if you don't have classes with mandatory attendance, or as if you don't have a job -- with exact change. If you've been busy for the last 3 weeks, and it's been more than the 21 days you're given to pay your ticket? No big deal, there's just a late fee. Want to know how much it is? Better consult your Ouija board. Your only hope is to call the office and get the exact number from them, but whenever I try it that seems tough to do -- two days in one week I was told that the only person who could help me was either out for the day or had left early (at noon!). What's that? You'll just bring extra cash? Oh, they don't make change.

*edit: it might be 5PM, actually. I forget. They don't even list the open hours online; you have to call to find out. Whatever.

Grumble, grumble, grumble. So maybe that rant was a little over-the-top; try asking me about it again when I don't have to try to make it over to the middle of Boston between German (12-1PM) and math (3-4PM) on one of two busy weekdays. My answer will probably be a little more reasonable.

Anyway, it's frustrating to keep a car in the city. I feel that I'm pretty good about it, driving several times a week and keeping close track of street sweeping and other such emergencies. I get towed about twice a year, and maybe earn myself one or two parking tickets on top of that. It still comes out to a heck of a lot less than the MIT parking charges, though (with much less reliability, timeslot availability, peace of mind, etc etc etc), but it's a luxury I still decide is worth it to me, and one I'm still willing to pay for. However, for those of you thinking about bringing a car into the city, think carefully about it.

(I just secretly want all the street parking for myself).

By the way, the title? When, a number of years ago, my family bought the car that I currently own, my mom gave it the name "Lucy".

Yours,
Grumbly Old Man Cam

So, here's another reason why you shouldn't think about bringing a car to MIT!

Once upon a time, in a land far far away (from all you non-local blog readers), a young man fresh in college would drive 17 miles each way from his childhood home as an intern. Occasionally, this young man had a hard time staying awake while on the road, so he would stop at the Wellesley MA rest town around exit 16 to buy soft ice cream and mountain dew from the fridge at his dad's house (yum, delicious). While this mountain dew drinking ice cream eating young man liked his internship, he secretly longed for the day when he would not have to spent 2.5 hours [every day] of his life driving to and from the internship that he liked.

As luck should have it, "the day" came on August 13th of 2010, and now that same (not as young) admissions blogger has a significantly reduced commute! Some days you can find him walking from his residence in East Campus to class which only takes him about 10 flights of stairs. Most days, you can catch him cruising through the dreams of his nights while sleeping in which only takes him about 2 hours (if there are no nightmares).

In case you are wondering, the admissions blogger of whom I speak is me. In the words of the incomprehensible pajamaman of Long Beach, Snoop Dogg, "He is I, and I am him....."

This August, I was looking out over the streets of Cambridge......

Nobody was out.......

....and I'm out of time! I'm headed off for an hour or two, when I come back I'll update this blogpost about keeping a car in the city and commuting to work this summer :)

I couldn't resist.
BRB,
-Cam

Update number one: I am going to do my homework and resume this post in another few hours.
BRB,
-Cam

"You might fit in at MIT if..."

you love being miserable!

Now wait just a second while I clean up this potential PR disaster; if I don't, Chris and Dave will probably turn me into bacon. (Speaking of which, do you know what form of pork I find to be often more delicious than bacon? Chinese barbeque pork (or at least, that's what I think it is -- browsing google images seemed to suggest that's what it's called. You know, the delicious pork dish that's so red it seems candied? Anywho)

More delicious than bacon? Perhaps.
Image taken from royalbaconsociety.com. Wait, what? Royal Bacon Society? Dare I even ask?

Speaking of bacon, I don't see what the big deal is, anyway. Bacon's just one of those foods that you're not allowed to dislike. You tell people you don't really like bacon and they tell you they're going to steal your firstborn and hold him hostage until you try bacon, because apparently if you don't like bacon you must have never tried it before. Alternatively, you tell people you don't like bacon and wake up in a bath tub full of ice, your kidneys removed, and a pile of bacon of comparable value to your kidneys in the living room with a note "it's for your own good."

Or maybe not. But people get too worked up over bacon; when I tell people that I don't especially care for bacon they sometimes look at me like I just said something nasty about their grandmother. However, it's time to move on with this blog post, before the bacon police come after me or (as previously warned) Chris and Dave turn me into tofu.

*for the record, I am okay with bacon. I'm just not a huge fan.

Two different things. Also, wow, that's an old (4 years) picture of me.

Moving on, really.

By now, you've probably forgotten what I began this post with; I certainly have. However, I'm going to write about being miserable.

I think people at MIT like to be miserable. I think, however, that it's not an oxymoron; keep reading, and maybe you'll see what I mean.

By "miserable", I mean absolutely and terribly busy.

I didn't use to think I was the kind of person who liked being busy; after all, I'm quite lazy, and procrastinate to the point of painfulness. Even when I don't have much work, I procrastinate; if I have to do one thing in a day, like get groceries, I can almost guarantee that I will take more than one day to do it. However, that's not to say I don't get things done.

The way it works for me is that when there are more things I want to and need to get done than one in a day -- when there are so many I can't possibly do them all, in a day or a week or even this year -- I begin to buckle down. I get efficient. I get into it.

I still procrastinate, I still take time to relax no matter how much work I'm facing, but when I have a lot of work is also when I most enjoy my relaxation. Sitting around and watching TV (Psych! the only show I pay significant attention to at the moment) is *boring* to me, when there's nothing else to do. At the end of this summer, I had two weeks with absolutely nothing I had to do, and I started off watching TV and sitting around with my laptop for the first two days. It was after I returned from one of the busiest vacations in my life -- if it can be called that -- which had immediately (<12hrs) followed the busiest work week of my life. It was a busy summer, and that's what Part 2 of this post will be: my busy summer. Part 3 is about this semester, and the wonderfully stupid choice I've made (that I don't yet regret at all, and hope to continue not regretting) I've made. However, when I returned from my busy summer to spend two weeks in front of the TV, I grew restless after two days. I started driving to MIT at nights to help out with rush and recruiting freshmen for my dormitory. I started working heavily on a project, and treating it like work. I tried to find more and more things that I wanted to do, knowing fully that I would only seriously approach a small number of them. In other words, I got busy.

I sometimes feel a bit miserable when I'm too busy. I think that's the one problem with this lifestyle: when things overload and there's too much to do, it stops being fun. When you've got regular life to keep up with in addition to all the fun projects and classes you want to pursue and the two sides conflict, it can start to feel like a demolition derby; then you realize you have a test next week and a pset due in four hours that you haven't started and you still haven't had time to buy groceries so you haven't had a meal in a week and you've been living off of yogurt and granola bars but you still can't keep up -- when it starts to feel more overwhelming than this run-on sentence -- that's when things get tricky.

However, those moments do not make up my life. I think one of the most important things at MIT is not learning to be efficient with your time -- time-management doesn't work for everybody, and it doesn't seem to work for me -- but rather learning how to deal with your time. How to handle those moments of tension and overload and take on just enough so that those moments are few and far between. I think furthermore that MIT is full of people like this, like me in this regard; I think we're a bunch of busybodies, too eager to pursue things to the point where our schedules become longer than our textbooks. I think that's a great thing; it certainly has potential to be a bad thing, but everybody I meet seems to have figured out how to keep it under control, and harnesses it to do amazing things.

What brought this to mind last week was a post-blogger-meeting trip to IKEA for my new standing desk -- expect an eventual (pre-2013 ;) ) blogpost about my attempts at using a standing desk, perhaps once I've had more time with it -- with Anna, whom you may have read about. Anna tried to enumerate to me the clubs she had joined and the activities she was pursuing -- the day before classes started, before any of the really heavy work had even begun -- and I malloc'ed to null, because it was an absolutely humongous list. I think it's what a lot of freshmen do, though -- you sign up for a million clubs, and in the end you only actually spend time at 15-20 of them (I kid -- it's definitely a single digit number). But anyway -- Anna, good luck with all that. I'll leave discussion about that list, though, and about narrowing down choices of activities, to you (if you want), since I have enough blog fodder lying around here somewhere. And I'm busy enough that I don't feel the need to add any more to the list, right now. (But thank you for inspiring these thoughts!)

I guess that's how it is here -- most people at MIT seem to love being busy, even if they (like me) don't realize it. However, you know what they say; misery loves company, and I think that the company here is some of the best. I don't think the busy leads to miserable, though; I think we keep it under control, and it feels awesome.

Just don't get so busy that you start having your cat do your homework for you.

From top to bottom: Vincent, cat.

-Cam

Oy! Welcome to the much-belated “what I’m doing this summer” post.

I’m working at Microsoft!

Ok, post over, back to work/weekend (maybe both, I’ve got a lot of work to do this weekend).

Just kidding. Unfortunately, the only ones of you who might’ve believed that my post ended there are likely the ones viewing MIT admissions on smartphones, to whom I say “ptooie” because I don’t have a smartphone and I think data plans are a rip-off. And because I wish my desktop computer’s LCD screens would have a reasonable pixel density compared to your phones.

Yeah, text-scrolling-based humor probably took a severe hit when screens started growing beyond 80x24 (characters, not columns – durned kids today, always thinking in pixels). Back in my – err, my dad’s – day...

Right. Moving on.

Back in January, when I was enrolled in this year’s Silly Robot Extravaganza 4000, I looked at my to-do list and saw the item that had been sitting on there for at least a month: get a job. Eww, jobs.

Anyway, being extremely lazy and procrastinatory, I decided to tell myself I was going to do it and proceed to do next to nothing. My interview process went as follows (note that I am too lazy to use <ul> and whatnot):

-Talk to sponsor corporation representatives at MASlab sponsor dinner, meet Guy Steele (!!!)
-Drop in on a random career fair at the student center completely unplanned
--schmooze
--collect swag (too many free bags! Companies: more flash drives and USB gadgets, ya hear? I have enough bags!)
--drop off resume at Microsoft table and chat with representative.

The last subitem on the list wasn’t one of my intentions. However, I can’t say now that I regret it at all. Although I’m saving that topic for another post (perhaps when my internship is over and I’m not working around-the-clock to meet my own personally-set deadlines), it comes up here because:

Microsoft sent me to Redmond! Huzzah!

Although I’m a field intern at their Cambridge office – a mere unfortunate stone’s throw from MIT (your stones would hit the roof of MIT’s building E60, probably (not (yet) tested), where I spent almost three summers working with MIT's Edgerton Center, and where I spent the third quarter of my sophomore year of high school working on MIT’s FIRST Robotics team #97. Which comes up as a point of discussion several times a month and probably will for the rest of my life, for better or for worse (same goes for this).

Uhh, sentence fragment from two sections above resuming... too much C++, not enough english recently.

(gdb) step

*just kidding I’m not working at a primarily-gcc-using-company

**this blog post probably leaks memory, I don’t free anything and there’s no RAII

***really moving on now

****quadruple pointers: you’re probably doing it wrong.

Anyway, although I’m a field intern, Microsoft this past past (past) week flew most of their field interns out to the main Redmond, WA campus for some “intern events”! Hooray, summer camp! Or something.

Yes, I actually saw this. No, I didn't take the image from a recent gizmodo post.

We six interns from Cambridge (host to more than six interns, but we were traveling as one unit) got to Redmond on Tuesday the 6th, where I proceeded to make all sorts of plans to explore the town, which definitely did not involve watching TV and falling asleep (relatively) early.

Wednesday and Thursday were the bulk of the trip; apparently traveling cross-country takes the better part of a day out of you. News to me, as this was my first time on the west coast! I loved it, although I don’t know if I’d rather live there than Boston. All I know is that I’d like to see some more of it. Who knows, maybe I’ll go back again and explore a bit, this summer...

On Wednesday I caught a cab from Microsoft’s campus into Seattle to visit my aunt; my aunt and uncle live in Seattle and I’d never been able to visit them in their state. After an excellent walk on trails that went right under the highway – something so urban-ly (not urbanely) weird to me, compared to parks in Boston – and delicious sushi for lunch, I caught another cab to amazon, where I met up with a friend from school to go rock climbing at a gym somewhere in Seattle. There’s a large group of MIT interns at Microsoft this summer, and it’s pretty cool to be able to find people from MIT – even people in my grade – working in amazing internships and jobs all over the country as early as freshman summer.

After rock climbing I scrambled (called a cab without hesitation, and proceeded to sit and wait calmly for fifteen minutes) and made it back to Microsoft’s campus in time for the real highlight of the week: the nerd circus.

Microsoft’s intern program definitely takes care of its interns when it comes to benefits; I had a cost-free (except for souvenirs and the cost of the non-Microsoft-planned rock climbing) week in Washington, and to top it off, this: they bought out an entire showing of Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza. What’s more, I had a center seat in the front section; lucky me! The show was personalized, but not at Microsoft’s request, hint, demand, or furtive eyebrow-waggling; no, the circus performers threw in tidbits like the occasional well-placed Windows sound effect or iPhone 4 “you’re holding it wrong” joke, just for us. The show had me doubled over laughing repeatedly, but that’s not what’s special – an episode of Psych can occasionally do the same thing – and that wasn’t throughout the performance. It was the scariness, fluidity, and 8.012-tacular (check OCW if you don’t get it) awesomeness of the acrobatics that blew me away and kept my heart rate semi-unhealthily high throughout the performance. I’ll admit, the acrobatics seemed so dangerous that at times I started (minimally) nervously sweating solely out of fear for the performers. The show wasn’t just a robotic display of gymnastics, though; the performers reacted to the audience quite well after their stunts. I hope we were a good audience; they deserved more than the standing ovation we gave them.

ANYWAY, I believe they’re performing in Boston now and all y’alls should go see them when or if you get a chance. My seat is, in my opinion, more than worth the near-$120 price (only a few months of your fancy shmancy smartphone’s data plan. Yeah, I’m talking to you, silly people with locked-into-data-plan-smartphones)* (see end of post for a far too relevant footnote), but there are cheaper seats available for the less enthusiastic.

The madness does not stop there, however.

Yep. Introducing: my new media player.

(the ‘hello from seattle’ is engraved on every Zune)

(this part’s not)

At the end of the show, Microsoft gave out 16GB Zune HD players to all of this year’s interns. I had been looking into buying a portable FM radio with a large honkin’ antenna for the past few weeks, but the radio reception on this (with the additional benefit of an HD radio receiver/decoder/thingamajig) blows away my other portables, and it stores a hefty amount of music. I am much impressed, although I’ve found (and internally reported – massive field test, eh? ;) ) a problem/complaint or two with it. I don’t know if I’d have bought one on my own, to replace the $1-from-woot.com Sandisk 1GB mp3 player / FM radio I’d been using, but receiving it for free was certainly nice.

I’m not trying to sell you on Microsoft – there are a small number of things I haven’t liked about my employment there, and a few things I still don’t really like; for example, I am writing this on the T (Boston’s subway) on my way home from the office, at about 10PM. However, some of those things are my own fault, and others are to be expected with a large company; I don't have the time to paint a full picture for you just yet. If this post was to be about jobs and internships in college, I would highly recommend checking out positions Microsoft, along with the rest of the “big dogs” – Google, Amazon, Apple, et cetera. However, I may do a post about working at Microsoft later on. This post is just supposed to be about my four day trip to Seattle, including an amazing visit to the (nerd) circus. The Microsoft-heavy content is hard to avoid, though, when I seem to be spending all my time working at or traveling with Microsoft.

Regardless, I hope you enjoyed my post and are thinking about going to see Cirque du Soleil. It’s a very impressive show, and I wanted to give the performers some recognition. They deserve it. Since I don’t think I managed to clap enough after the performance – thank you, Cirque du Soleil, for a great experience. And a special thumbs up to Mr. Circus Unicycle Man for a really cool unicycle mount that I’d never seen before – not more memorable than the rest of the show, but it stuck in my head (I’d give a thumbs up to another set of performers, but if I did I might give away their act because I don’t know how else to describe them). Anyway; if any of the circus performers from that show read this blog, they’ll probably know what I’m talking about. If not, I’ll just go on rambling and wasting your time; if you’ve read this far, who knows what else I can get you to read ;)
-Cam

*footnote: word on the street is that we’re getting more than just Zune HDs – woot woot!. Ironically, as a very-tired-that-day field intern, I found out about that from an Amazon intern and then from Gizmodo before I found out from Microsoft.

**double footnote: the subtitle for this post, and the delay in bringing it to you, was because I needed to check about Microsoft confidentiality before posting it. Smart thing to do.

***actually, I just found this blog post on a bar stool in California, disguised as an iBlogPost 3G.

****enough with the pointers they're driving me crazy why do I memory leak I don't even

Where were you a year ago today? Ed.: that is, a year before June 25, 2010...

It's perhaps shocking and quite revealing about our culture that these events stand out in tandem to me, but there are two days in my life that felt quite similar: September 11th, 2001, and June 25th, 2009 -- the day of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the day of Michael Jackson's death. For both of those days, I remember exactly where I was and how I reacted.

I don't mean to compare relative impacts and significances for those days by mentioning them together; consider though that for the first, I was only in elementary school, and for the second, I was newly done with high school, and better able to perceive my surroundings and their significance.

A year ago today, I felt a new kind of shock. I spent my morning and afternoon in lab at MIT, working on an application that eventually quadrupled the sampling rate for the sensor we were using. I left after dinner, walking towards central square with only a few hours of daylight left which I hoped not to spend in traffic. I was headed to alewife, where I would fetch my car for the uncomfortable daily fee of seven dollars and sit in awful traffic until I could take the highway back to my (then) home. Coincidentally, one day short of a year afterward, I became no longer able to call that place home, but that's a different topic (and one of the less fun reasons I've been so busy, recently).

I was walking through central square when I felt the first ripples. Outside of the McDonald's on Massachusetts Avenue stood three punks (I use the term punks because the image you should have in your head is that of punks standing on a street corner in a bad 80s teen comedy, smoking and wearing unusual amounts of leather. Replace the leather pants with skinny jeans and any odd jackets with awkwardly plaid shirts, change the category to hipsters, but keep the stigma of 'punk' and you'll imagine what I encountered). Some of these punks called out to me:

"Hey, Michael Jackson's dead!"

I thought they were joking, and didn't acknowledge them, eager to make it home.

To a fellow punk: "Doesn't even look at us. Nobody cares." [laughter]

As I walked, I thought of what an odd thing to say that was; although attempted provocation of passers-by isn't all that uncommon, why would they bring up Michael Jackson, who (I thought, at least) had been out of the spotlight for a few years? Was it possible they weren't joking? On the T, I started to hear more of the story.

As people got on at harvard, porter, davis, I heard more: "Did you hear about MJ? Is it true?". "What happened to Michael Jackson?"

The spread of news was amazing; I'm sure a similar spread occurred in 2001, although I was too young to observe it. The ripples turned into waves, and when I got into the car the tsunami hit: there was no music.

No music, only talk radio. All of the stations were talking and confirming what I'd slowly began to fear (and why I feared it, I didn't know) -- Michael Jackson had died. The King of Pop was gone.

For the past few years, Michael had been an easy target. The color of his skin, the child abuse scandal -- the internet ate him up. One of the Scary Movies featured a nasty MJ jab, I remembered. There was the photoshopped movie poster for Home Alone with MJ's face in the window, spread endlessly over the internet. The jokes went on; the King of Pop was being treated as a jester. I think that much of my generation focused on Michael in that light; we grew up on the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears (umm... no comment). And, in the uncomfortable middle school years, who of my age -- trying desperately to be funnier than their friends -- didn't crack at least one joke about Michael Jackson and child abuse, or his amazing color-changing abilities? Regrettably, I almost certainly did; fortunately, I don't remember them. However, it seemed to me that Michael had been dragged down from his throne as the King of Pop.

As I caught the news over the radio stations, the Michael Jackson of my middle school years was what I expected to hear remembered.

Instead of condemnations and stories of scandal, I heard praise.

I heard the world come together -- not just through broadcast media, but through conversations in the student center and on the T in the week to follow -- after a man's death, and I heard them praise him for his accomplishments rather than make a mockery of his failures as had been the norm of recent years. I heard us recognize the man's talents and his weaknesses, and I was amazed. I didn't expect the world to be able to love a man who'd committed such atrocities, but I was shocked and amazed that we were able to. I don't in any way condone child molestation, and I know the world doesn't either; that's what made it remarkable to me. I guess I just didn't think the world would be able to separate sin from a sinner. I didn't think that we, as a people, were that nice. I was very refreshingly shown just how wrong I was. As I listened to "Billie Jean" and drove down route 2 west, I was shell shocked, and I drove slowly in contemplation; sad that we'd lost such a talented man, but happy to see us accepting him as we seemingly hadn't near the end of his life.

I remember wishing I had some venue through which to offer my respect for the man's accomplishments, and to share what I've shared here. A year and a blog later, here is to Michael Jackson.

For the last week, I've listened to Oldies 103.3 FM at work; every day, they made mention of their Michael Jackson tribute scheduled for Friday. Today, spending a few hours in the car, I enjoyed remembrance of the emotions I'd felt driving one year ago, and I listened to some good music.

Where were you, the day Michael Jackson died?

They say sometimes about MIT that of sleeping, studying, and socializing, you're forced to choose two. Well, they're almost right...
Some weeks you only get to choose one.

It's a lifestyle not for everybody, certainly; at times rewarding, and at times quite painful.

Eight hours or so until I'm done with this unhealthy week.
My weapon of choice:

For the sake of not scaring my parents too much, let's pretend that's the first such item I've consumed today (yesterday, today, 24 hours, whatever).

Good luck, all, and remember: you're almost there.

Here, have some 70s:

P.S., thank you Costas for the 15-213 wakeup call. Two's complement & bitwise ops are a good way to wake up.

Oh, by the way: today I declare Course VI (EECS) as my major. :)

Welcome to campus! If you're not here yet, hurry up and get here, and if you are, you shouldn't waste too much time reading our silly blogs -- they'll still be here after you leave. However, if you aren't sure what to do yet with your CPW, here are some tips from my experience last year / my observations of other peoples' experiences.

In no particular order,

• Don't spend too much time with your host! CPW is not "meet this cool one MIT student and get to know them and blah blah blah". Although your host is probably a fairly awesome person, they'll be around for at least one more year (unless they're old, in which case, why are you hanging around with somebody so old and crusty anyway? Just kidding, seniors). CPW is a chance for you to meet people in your grade and go to once-in-a-CPWtime events and have once-in-a-CPWtime experiences! If you like your host, maybe hang out with them once, but don't just go to their events and their living group; you'll miss a lot. If America's supposed to be a melting pot, then MIT is a boiling cauldron of every possible kind of weirdness (and some sanity) that you'll ever encounter. Don't get a sheltered perspective! Go out, see it all. Your host tell you East Campus is weird and scary? So what! Live a little, get over here (I live in EC, and I don't bite). Your host tell you West Campus is full of jocks? I know firsthand that's not true, and I also know firsthand that even those 'jocks' can be pretty cool. Go out there and explore! Seriously. I feel that girls especially often feel too pressured to spend time with their hosts; "sorry, my host and I are going to lunch! And then she's going to show me" BLAH BLAH BLAH. You like her? Catch her after the fun, when you're recuperating.

• Make friends in your grade! Although this is a spillover from the general-CPW-rant that the previous item became, it's important enough to be repeated here. I still know and talk to a number of people I met during CPW, whom I would never have met otherwise during my freshman year. I think my phone's contact book filled up during CPW faster than it did when they transferred my bajillion contacts after purchase; seriously, if you do decide to come here, these are the people you'll be learning, growing, blah blah blah cheesy metaphor with. Although the undergraduates already here are many kinds of awesome, your grade is going to be 1/4 of it for 4 years, and they'll the people you'll have the chance to know for the longest. Get to know them!

• Eat a lot. CPW is full of free food. Enough said. That $20 in tech cash they give you? Use it right away for non-food (buy something semi-useful at Verde's, if you can) because there's food all over, 24/7. And it's not half-bad. CPW should be more or less free.

• Don't spend too much time in any one place. This one's a broader version of the first point; CPW is a smorgasboard of smorgasms*, and you should have them all. Or something. Again: You'll have four years. *I don't know what that means or is even supposed to mean; don't ask.

• Come to MITERS! Shameless plug. Chris and I were going to try to get you to come hang out at MITERS, but we had too much work this week to do the blog post we wanted to. MITERS has spawned a number of cool things, the most famous of which I'll just link you to right now: a (non-river) Charles. In a nutshell, if you've ever decided something on instructables was cool, come to MITERS. It's not that far -- very close to Chicago pizza (open till 4am, if you need a place to snag a drink), just a 2 minute walk down Mass Ave from the Student Center -- and it'll definitely be worth the trip. Directions: N52-115. Best time to come is probably Friday night, 7pm onwards, before your parties start up. It's in the butt-end of the MIT Museum building, kind-of. Edit: MITERS has spawned more than Charles. See: Squid Labs (Instructables! Whoa, we spawned that?), Z-Corp, & more. Whoa. (If you don't know what those are, use your google)

• BE FLEXIBLE! I think this also repeats the general idea present in most of these tips (play Twister? nyuk nyuk nyuk, puns), but: don't fix your schedule! There are cool things that come up, and even if you really really really were planning on going to have pancakes or play foosball at living group X, don't hesitate to go with the flow and live in the moment and other cliches, because CPW should be spontaneous. Plan it out, and you're liable to miss out on a number of cool things. I think I also missed out on some of the official / mandatory / whatever events, but hey, those might be pretty cool too. Activities Midway / Academic Fair = bags of swag. It's like halloween.
  

Last minute addendum: See a sunrise! Sleep may or may not be for pansies, but you can afford to do it at least once this weekend. Good fun.

Ok, Cam out. Time to do my work so I can haze you all (legal note: kidding) when you get here; one last note, if you see me at any time during the weekend feel free to say hi, ask a question, whatever! I promise to give you wrong directions and whatnot, so that you look even more like a lost prefrosh.

Peace.

Since I've gone and missed most of the period where bloggers post advice on rejection, acceptance, financial aid, your sex life, the measles.... wait, back it up. Since I've gone and missed the immediately-post-decisions blogging spree, I'll dedicate this blog entry to looking ahead! Here, from your temporarily-a-sellout blogger, is a word about CPW!

Allow me to begin with an anecdote:

Four months ago, before winter break -- and a few days before all of you Early Action admits heard the good news -- two of my friends from Wayland High School, Kevin and Michelle (currently HS seniors), came into the city for dinner. However, the MIT Winter Logs concert was that night, and we decided to first check it out. MIT seems to be littered with free a cappella performances (people litter a lot in cities; MIT also seems to be littered with grad students nobody's bothered to clean up) (I jest -- the grad students here aren't unclean, or at least that holds for the subset I've met), and after a hard week of work and exams a concert is a good way to unwind.

As this was four months ago, I only remember two highlights from the concert, both of which are something far too common here at MIT. One problem with MIT is that you far too often have the "Hey! I know {him, her, that}!" syndrome. I read Gizmodo for regular tech news (as does Steve Jobs, apparently); about once a day, when I tab to an article that I think sounds especially cool, I scroll down only to uncover pictures of the Media Lab, or a car which frequently blocks the lathe (or did this summer, anywho), or a Charles. If you're a geek, you won't be able to escape hearing about MIT; even for MIT readers of less-geeky news, it's hard to avoid the "Hey! I know that guy!" syndrome.

For example, at the Winter Logs concert (which, by the way, is a concert put on my MIT's Logarhythms, the all-male a cappella group -- more to come), the freshmen Logs put on a skit for the audience that they'd been working on. The end result of the skit caught me completely off guard -- as a tall fellow with blonde hair started

HEY GUS I'M REALLY HAPPY FOR YOU, IMMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT THE MIT LOGS HAVE ONE OF THE BEST VIDEOS OF ALL TIME

Err, right. As one freshman broke out into a Taylor Swift - You Belong with Me solo, I thought "Whoa! I know that guy!" (Also, please forgive me -- I hate to call upon internet memes, but it fit too well.)

After the concert, I talked to Gus -- the Taylor-Swift-singing-fellow -- and asked him if I could do a blog post about his performance at the concert. I had been blown away by his performance, being caught completely off guard; it was hilarious, but it was also very *good*. It was an awesome "Hey, I know that guy!" moment, and I wanted to share with you all the video of a tall guy with a deep voice singing Taylor Swift. Unfortunately, the Logs had some technical difficulties with that part of the concert (although this was more of a sound-quality issue, even at MIT it's especially frustrating when your TA can't seem to get powerpoint open; nobody ever really escapes "technical difficulties", at any level (in my most recent case, ubiquitous segfaults)), so this other video from that night will have to do instead.

(Apologies to those who don't like the song; they've got lots of other great stuff, if you don't like this one, though).

Where am I going with all this? Well, let's finish up with my other moment from the Winter Logs concert, first:

At the end of the concert, the Logs sang a Logs classic: Super Logs. When they started to sing, a large group from the crowd ran up to and hopped on the stage and started singing with them; Logs alumni!

Back in high school, Kevin, myself, and some other fellows from Wayland worked on several projects here at MIT, more or less under the direction of the Edgerton Center (Enough links for you?). Which meant that, when we saw the last man from the audience run up to the stage, we both started cheering as loud as possible:

ED! (This happens to be the only picture of the man I have on hand)

For the second time that night, I was caught completely off guard; I've worked with Ed for several years now, on a number of ridiculous, awesome, and occasionally ridiculously awesome projects. (The photo above is a decent example of one of them; for full effect, check out the slideshow on flickr.

Although I knew Ed was a former Log, it was still pretty darn cool to see him up on stage singing.

In summary, I never did get to blog about the Winter Logs concert. But moving on! Here's a blogpost about MIT's a cappella groups, and this time it's pre-emptive! (wait, what? I don't know.)

PRE-EMPTIVE A CAPPELLA CONCERT BLOG POST begins here.

For all you CPW-attending prefrosh who haven't had been exposed to MIT's a cappella scene (or, who haven't seen parts of MIT's a cappella scene slightly exposed), this event is for you! (there's an event for that? nah). Introducing: SGBIS! Which probably stands for Singing Groups Beat Infertility and Socialism, or something similar.

Update: I have been informed by the Council of People Who Know Things About This Obscure Acronym (CPWKTATOA), a.k.a. one of the Logs, that it stands for Spring Greater Boston Invitational Songfest.

This CPW, coming to an MIT near you, all of MIT's a cappella groups will be performing for free! And they've asked me, more or less, to let you all know about it. Except they didn't tell me what SGBIS stood for, so feel free to post your interpretations in the comments. I would highly recommend going to this event; although it's two hours, I don't think they'd mind if you just stopped in for a while, and MIT's a cappella groups are very well known. Plus, if you want to take your shower-based rendition of a Lady Gaga song to the next level, these are the people to talk to. After the show, you'll be able to talk to the members of the group about what it's like to sing a cappella at MIT, what it takes to join, and snag their phone numbers if you really want. (Editor's note, meaning blogger's note: I may be using my poetic/bloggetic license there, as they may not have told me they would give their phone numbers to adoring audience members. However, I suppose you could try it and see how they respond. Tip: It's best to stare creepily at them until they ask you what you're doing, and then respond with "How you doin'?", a-la-Joey)

Who will be there, you ask?

Well, we've got (in order of appearance at the event)

The Chorallaries of MIT

Syncopasian

The Muses

Techiya

Resonance

Asymptones

Cross Products

The Toons

The Logarhythms

If you think you might be interested in joining any of these groups, or just want to sit in on a free concert and take a break from the whirlwind that is CPW, you should check it out!

The details:
What: SGIBS, or something?
When: Friday, April 9th, 4-6pm
Where: 34-101
Who: All of the above.

Also, stay tuned, because I might be telling you about another awesome CPW event as the event draws near. I'll try not to spam you too much with such things, though -- I'd been meaning to blog about the Winter Logs concert for a long time, and since a cappella groups here are so popular, I thought that when asked I would pass along the word about this concert. Don't worry, I'm not completely sold out. (Prices begin at $1million per blog entry, contact today for a quote, companies! (Just kidding. Although if for some reason you wanted to give me a million dollars, or were even thinking about it, hit me up with an e-mail, because that'd be pretty cool.))

Coming up next: a bit of a look at what I've been doing this semester, and some other miscellany.

P.S., if you're looking for summer jobs or internships, you should really apply now (or, a month ago) -- just a reminder :)

P.P.S. (Post Partum Separation, not Post Script): admissions site staff, do we really not have a post category for "CPW"? (rhetorical question since I'm going to e-mail it to y'all anyways)

Till next time,
-Cam

Just kidding.

However, lucky you, I'm going to tell you what I've been doing anyway.

I've been making a robot!. As the hyperlink implies, I've been participating in the same robotics class as Snively, this IAP.

The class is called MASlab, and is one of the few MIT courses I've run up against so far that is referenced by name rather than number (although for reference, the number is 6.186 -- MASlab is a course 6 class, but it is also listed in courses 2 and 16, which means you can take it for EECS, Mechanical Engineering, or Aero/Astro!) MASlab stands for Mobile Autonomous Systems laboratory, which means that a bunch of college-type kids have to build a bunch of bumbling-type robots. By "bumbling", I mean that the robots are acting entirely under their own brainpower, in a partially foreign environment. Not all robots bumble, when placed in the environment, but many do; it's tricky to program autonomous robots.

To roughly (and hopefully, correctly) describe the competition, us student-folk have the month of IAP to design, build, and program an autonomous robot which uses a camera and numerous other, smaller sensors to navigate around a playing field. There are (up to?) 16 balls, red and yellow, on this field, and there are red and yellow goals. Robots earn points by scoring balls in red and yellow goals, with different point rewards based on color matching. The competition lasts five minutes, which is an awfully short amount of time for a month of work. To help robots navigate the playing field, the walls are white with a blue edge on top; additionally, there are "barcodes" on walls throughout the playing field which act as landmarks for robots using mapping algorithms. Processing occurs on an asus eeePC running linux, and robot control is (traditionally -- some teams decide to go above and beyond) performed over the OrcBoard, which controls the motors and accesses the non-camera sensors.

Also, in case you didn't catch it from the second to last link: maslab has a youtube channel! Snag it at http://www.youtube.com/user/MITMaslab .

Anywho, onto the guts of it all.

This fall, three juniors with whom I live (happy, grammarfolk?) approached me about working on their maslab team, because of my previous experience with both programming and mechanical engineering. They warned me that maslab would consume all of my time over IAP; they jokingly told me that it would take up 24 hours a day, and they weren't far off. Since January 4th, I've spent most of every day working on a tiny robot that likes to wobble all over the place. We're making quite a lot of progress, though -- the robot is almost entirely constructed, and we're debugging a large part of our vision code, with sensor and odometry modules being developed in parallel.

Check it out!

As I think I mentioned in my bio, I spent three years in high school working on a recently-blogged subject: FIRST robotics. I spent a year on MIT's team before leaving to start a team at my high school, with three of my friends, and FIRST was hugely influential in my personal and academic development. Since maslab occurs at the same time as FIRST does, this January feels to me like the last three, except that when I go home the robots come with me. It's been busy and it's been crazy, but just like FIRST it feels rewarding.

I can't bring myself to write too much more about it, though, because I've spent a lot of time already doing just that:
http://maslab.mit.edu/2010/wiki/Team_Three/Journal

That is our team's journal, on the maslab 2010 wiki, authored primarily by yours truly. Pretend it's an extension to this blog post :) (Hence the title)

Also, for more on maslab, I'd especially recommend checking out maslab's front page, and the main wiki page:
http://maslab.csail.mit.edu/
http://maslab.mit.edu/2010/wiki/Maslab_2010

And, for your amusement, a recent test video (that's not my voice, by the way):

Now, moving on.

As the older and crustier of you blogreaders may know, I've left something up in the air from fall semester: 18.022. Check my previous blog posts for more on that; in short, I miserably failed a test -- getting a 36 -- with one of the two lowest grades in the class (if I recall correctly), and learned a lesson or two from it. Now that fall semester's over, I have some results for y'all.

I don't have access to the online grading system for that class anymore, since I'm no longer enrolled (because fall semester's over, not because of anything bad), so there's no dramatic screenshot to present here. Long story made short: I pulled through and got a 94 on the third test, bringing my average back up to a comfortable number. It was quite the learning experience for me; it brought out a quality in me that I hadn't had to call on in a long time. It taught me that if I just persevere and don't give in when it feels hopeless, I can pull through. Sappy? Perhaps, but darned useful.

To jump back to the original topic of this post, though, there's one thing I'm trying to do this IAP that I haven't yet mentioned to you: 6.184. 6.184 is known as "caffeinated 6.001". 6.001 (six double-oh one) was, some years ago, MIT's introductory computer science course; it has a somewhat legendary status. As soon as I heard about it and checked out the course info (and textbook -- available for free online, and highly recommended!), it was *the* course I wanted to take, even before I got to MIT. I was quite disappointed to find out some weeks after learning of its existence that it in fact existed no longer. They stopped offering the course a few years ago, and replaced it with 6.01. 6.01 (six oh one) is a course that teaches introductory EECS using a prebuilt robotics platform and the python programming language; the transition is rather well described, in my humble opinion, here. Now that 6.001 is dead and gone, though, 6.184 is a course offered over IAP that condenses a famous, semester-length class into 8 lectures and 4 projects. It's a lot of work, a lot of confusion, and a lot of fun. And Yan's taking it too!

I may have to drop it, though, this IAP; I barely have time to keep up with meals and laundry, as is, and I've been sick for the last four days. Time to rest up. But, hey, there's always next year, right? (Unless they really use the LHC, which is a supermegaworldbomb -- don't let the rumors that it's "for science" deceive you)

Hola!

The title and mini-description attached to this post may have, despite my best efforts, given some of you a clue as to what this post will be about. Anybody who read my last post might also know, as I gave away some spoilers.

Brought to you just in time for 2010 (think about it -- the writing of this post spanned almost TWO YEARS. I should get a raise for that), it's Cam's thoughts on the college essay process!

Huzzah!

Three Saturdays ago, I was walking through a far-too-familiar part of campus with my friend Kevin. (Coincidentally, my brother is also named Kevin. Relevant to you? Nope, but you read it anyways. Congratulations, you're procrastinating. Stop procrastinating and skip ahead to the college-relevant material, you slacker.) (Did the previous run-on aside cause you to forget what I was talking about? Good! Some mental exercise for you and literary laziness for me.) Because this year Kevin, a friend from my high school, is like many of you -- e.g. prefrosh material -- we were talking about the college essay process.

For many people at my school, and many other people I knew, the college essay process was Not Fun. I can certainly agree with that when looking at the volume of work most high school seniors get themselves into -- e.g. the paperwork starts to ascend its usual two dimensions and acquire volume, because, well, there's a lot of it. Or, the electronic bits storing your apps start to acquire volume, but .... hey, stop questioning my word usage.

The other reason many people found the college essay to be Not Fun, though, and the reason I want to waste your time with here, was that "they hated writing about themselves."

Kevin and I, walking somewhere on campus, came to perhaps a far-too-hasty conclusion: that's stupid.

We stopped (conversationally, that is), realized that might be not quite what we meant, and tried to describe what we actually meant.

See, here's the thing -- the revolutionary bit -- what those people don't know is that the college essay should be *fun*. (eww, I sound like a guidance counselor... I promise, I'm still only one year past all y'alls) (Yep, I'm from Massachusetts, and I say that sometimes, mostly for kicks. People get angry at me for it) The college essay is a lot of work, but the work should not be bad; the reason behind that is fairly simple. You get to write about yourself! You're not being self-centered, you're not facing a yawning audience; you're trying to show people the best parts about you! Now, granted, some people with low self-esteem might not like writing about themselves, but here's the cool bit: they're not asking you to write about your faults! They want the best of you. The college essay is the time to shamelessly (but truthfully -- start lying and you'll run into trouble, so please please please don't do it?) put your best foot forward and talk about you, the bits of you that you like most and that define you. That should be fun. If there's something about you that you wouldn't enjoy sharing with other people, then perhaps you shouldn't put it on your college application -- think first for a second about why you don't enjoy it.

It's more than that, though; it's not just writing about yourself. It's writing about your passions, your hobbies, your interests and your real drive; give them the reason you get up in the morning, give them the reason you stay up late, and give them the reason you like being you! Or if there's something in your life you want to change, give them that! The college essay, at least for most prompts (disclaimer: I haven't looked at any, this year, including MIT's >_<), is fairly flexible, because it's designed to let you shine through, not just an essay.

And are you ready for the best part?

No matter what you write, your audience has to read it!* They get paid to read your college essay! Hah! And don't think it's minimum wage -- just the other day, I was talking with Matt in the admissions office about which new Ferrari he's going to buy.** See, these people get money (cash, bills, dough!) to read YOUR essay about YOU.

So why give them anything less?

*I think so. Unless you don't write it, anyway.
**I'm making this up. However, Matt, if it were true that you can afford a Ferrari and are purchasing one, why haven't you offered me rides yet?

The college essay is your chance to shine; it's a lot of work, but it's where you're supposed to show people everything you're proud of, and everything you've worked for; if you've worked for things you care about, that should be a whole lot of fun. So procrastinators and re-writers alike (or anybody else still writing a college essay this year), go for it! You have till sometime tomorrow (check Matt's post for the details) to get your essays in. Go make 'em great.

Err, disclaimer: Despite being employed by MIT Admissions, I know very little about the college essay and how it's evaluated. This is just my take on it. And Kevin's. Don't take it as the official word of the admissions office, please; take it as one student's blogular ramblings. (Also, good luck in March, everybody!)

Have a happy 2010, and stop worrying about college so much -- go enjoy the rest of your senior year.

That's all, folks.
-Cam

When I applied to MIT, I put down on my application that my probable choice of major (or however it is they ask you what it is you want to do) was mechanical engineering. I liked to build things and create things, and I thought that led me to being a mechanical engineer.

Fast forward a year, and I've had some new thoughts on the matter.

I've always enjoyed making things; that hasn't changed at all. This summer, for example, I built a bike. Working at MITERS, one of MIT's student groups which I believe I've mentioned before (and will someday blog about), I decided that I wanted to have a bike for when I came to campus in the fall. I didn't want to bring the nice bicycle I had at home, which my grandparents had given me my freshman year of high school; everybody had told me that living in the city, you'd have a bike stolen at least once -- if you were lucky.

However, I didn't want a piece-of-trash bike with a rusty chain and a metal post for a seat (ouch). I wanted something nice, something snazzy, something that I would still enjoy. I didn't want to spend a ton of money, so I set about trying to acquire something meeting all those criteria, on the cheap. Yeah, I'm picky.

One day this summer, the very-much-publicized Charles Guan sends out the following e-mail:

3 bikes in mostly good repair on the loading dock.

also, someone's nuclear apocalypse survival kit complete with soviet literature
and yellow bunny suit. but i already claimed that.

get the rest y/n

-c

Score! A few e-mails later, and Charles snagged one of the bikes for me. That afternoon, I came by to check it out: an older, Ross-brand single speed bike, with a kickin' retro seat and a basket on back. I liked it, but wanted to touch it up. I began by stripping the paint, painting it blue, and failing at putting it back together again: (I could've sworn there were more parts in the front fork... Gremlins must've taken them.)

Oh.

Also, I soon came to the (aided) realization that I had a women's frame. With my masculinity feeling threatened (and the frame being too small for me), I set about acquiring a different (but used, cheap) frame.

Fast forward a medium amount of money, a lot of time digging around a *bike graveyard* and in the bike store, and I had most of a bike. I ended up with a maroon frame, sweet plain handlebars, the old seat, and a really nice 3-speed gearbox. Because I was building the bike, and because it sounded like a really cool idea, I didn't want lots of sprockets and tensioners and shifters; I opted to buy a wheel with a planetary gearbox in the wheel hub, which gave me three speeds with no shifting roller chain. (Fyi, three has proven more than enough for the city) Some elbow grease, some bearing grease, and some pizza grease (from Chicago Pizza) later, I had a bike.

Wewt.

(Note: I know that when I talk about this as "building" a bike, it really means that I just assembled a bike from mostly junked but already-existing bike parts. Nothing too impressive; however, there are some people at MIT who've actually designed and built bicycles from scratch, and that's pretty cool).

Where am I going with this? Hang on, I'm almost done.

This semester, after finishing my critically acclaimed (what does that even mean?) fork, I decided in my freshman seminar that I wanted to build a steel table. It took three+ weeks of forging (working a few hours a week), which make for a fairly boring story, so I'll only share the end result with one awesome detail: when I finished making the table, from 18 feet of steel rod, we put a piece of sheet steel on it as a test surface. Instructor and general cool-dude Mike Tarkanian took out his iPod Touch, and took me by surprisre: he bought an app, on the spot, that would use the iPod's built-in accelerometer as a surface level for the table. As much as I am *not* an Apple fan, I thought that was pretty awesome. Also awesome was that, through eyeballing my handiwork, I had built the table to within 1.3 degrees of level (referenced to the floor). Woot!

Anyway, here it is; the picture was taken in a bathroom because I wasn't sure where I could find a nice backdrop for a test shot. Also, the glass top is borrowed; I haven't bought one of my own, yet.

Anyway, what does this all come down to?

The reason I enjoyed building this table, the reason I enjoyed building my bicycle, and the reason I enjoy using linux -- not Ubuntu-"everything works and looks shiny!"-linux, but "darn, I have to compile drivers again, this sucks"-linux -- is the reason I thought I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I do like building things, but I like building them because I want to be a part of the creation process, I want to understand and have some part in the things around me. I like customizing things, I like doing things the hard way, and I like taking things apart even when I can't put them back together; I like all this because I like to create. I don't know yet if that means creating things in the mechanical realm, as a choice of course 2 for my major would suggest, or in other fields -- perhaps algorithms? -- but I do know that I like to take the hard way, often for less effective results (the chain fell off my bike while I was riding it, a while back, putting me on crutches >_<), and I know it is that quality that will lead me to whatever major I do choose to pursue here at MIT.

In a less overarching sense, though, that has some consequences for the present: During my first few weeks at MIT, both of the (old) laptops I had brought to campus broke (A three-year-old Compaq I'd bought in high school, and a $140 tablet I'd snagged on ebay at the start of the summer). Although I've been getting by on a netbook since, an Eee PC does not make for a good primary computer.

Time to get building!

Till next time,
-Cam

[Sneak preview: Next week may be some of my thoughts about the college essay, although those thoughts do not reflect any opinions of the MIT admissions office (blah, blah, blah). This is for you, regular-action procrastinators!]

[Of course, it may not be, if I decide to write about something else. I change my mind often.]

I'm sorry you haven't heard from me in a while; I'm working on passing the aforementioned 18.022 exam. Final in 8 hours, you'll hear from me after that :)

However, in the meantime: Congratulations to all the accepted students!

Last year, a number of "MIT Class of 2013" groups started to form; however, there was one semi-official one that we linked to here on the blogs (although I wasn't a part of the "we", then). For your benefit, so you can all get to know each other in one central Mark Zuckerberg-approved location, I'll suggest the group for this year:

MIT Class of 2014:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=info&ref=search&gid=286456620522

Congratulations again!

(Disclaimer: This group is in *no way* official. I'll see if they guy who started it will make one of the bloggers an admin, though, so that there's some modicum of admissions-based administration. I would've done that before posting this, but because of finals I forgot about decisions until right now. Whoops.)

If you've been reading the blogs a long time, you may have noticed a few trends. Every year, each blogger gets two freebie posts; for fall and spring semester, you can write about your schedule. Easy, over, done. However, the nature of MIT lends itself to one more blogger freebie. In four years of reading the blogs, I don't remember ever seeing it advertised as such, but that's what it is. It's not a freebie in the sense that it requires little effort or thought to write about, but in the sense that MIT gives you the topic with little effort on your part.

Yep, I'm talking about failure.

Marcela has already written about 18.022; I'd like to elaborate a little on my experiences in that class.

The first test was altogether not that bad for me. However, it seemed that way at first. I walked out of it with a horrible sinking feeling, not wanting to talk to anybody. I thought it was fairly likely that I'd failed the test, even though I'd studied hard; near the end I took the time to figure out that I had barely completed 65 out of 100 points. I had been able to confidently complete at least some of that material, guaranteeing that I would receive points. I suppose that's better than nothing, right? Either way, I walked out of Walker Memorial (one of the common exam-taking-areas) completely crestfallen. After a little walking around, I ran into a friend, a senior, who asked me what was wrong; I told him I thought I'd failed my first test, and he somehow refrained from smacking me (which I would've deserved; I was being ridiculous about the entire ordeal). Failing tests isn't all that bad, around here, and completing 65% of the material isn't all that bad either. However, even though people had said that to me, I hadn't quite come to accept it, so I felt horrible. He cheered me up a little before I moved on in my mindless wandering.

Eventually, I decided to stop moping and do something about it. I had been considering dropping 18.022 for weeks, and taking 18.02 -- a less challenging multivariable calculus course, the one that most freshmen take. I had been struggling since the beginning in 18.022, and everything seemed impossible; still, I wasn't sure if that was how it should be, and I wasn't sure how to make a decision to drop the class. I wandered over to the professor's office -- Professor Kemp -- and talked with him about it for a few minutes. He was busy, but he told me not to worry so much; he had made the test too long, and very few people had finished. Since I was thinking about dropping the class, he offered to schedule a meeting with me later in the week to discuss it.

After that, I cheered up a good deal, and distracted myself for a few hours. I had an evening class, but I skipped it to make myself some comfort food; a steak and mashed potato dinner later, I was feeling worlds better. Finally, the grades came online. I was shocked: 65. Having barely completed that many points, I was more surprised than disappointed with my score. Soon after, I received an e-mail from Professor Kemp (also a great lecturer, with the unfortunate ability to write faster on a chalkboard than I can on paper) telling me that my grade was (slightly, as it turned out) above the class average, and that looking at both that and my pset grades, I probably had a B in the class. I was amazed; I almost immediately stopped thinking about dropping the class, and realized that I had to adjust my standards from what they'd been in high school.

However, that was the last test; all in all, it went fairly well, and is certainly not a story about failure. I did learn a lesson or two from it, but it is not the story of this blogpost.

The story of this blogpost can be summarized in a slightly-trimmed-to-500x23 screenshot:

...Err, yes.

And, just to be clear: on the first exam, the average was a 60, so a 65 was a decent grade. Two hours after I saw the above results online, Professor Kemp sent an e-mail to the class, containing the following:

The average on Exam 2 was 70%, with a standard deviation of 18%. Passing was 50%. If you would like to speak to me about anything grade-related, please e-mail me to make an appointment, and I'll be happy to meet you sometime this week. Onward we go! Cheers, Prof. Kemp.

This places me squarely in the "failing" category; the average is almost twice my score, and I am close to two standard deviations below the mean. Some statistics (say, a normal model) would say that this places me in the 2.9th percentile for this exam. In a class of.... 100? Wonderful.

Hey, at least I get a blog post out of it, right?

I'm still not really sure what to think of failure, at MIT. Despite all my studying, my test average is now a 50.5 in that class, something that would've slaughtered me in high school; although I was not an A student, and not at the top of my class, (if memory serves) I don't think I got a grade lower than a 70 on any test or quiz until my senior year. And this test was different than the last one; there was no panic-y rushing through the exam, looking for problems I could solve. This time, I sat there (much more painfully) for an hour and watched myself be completely unable to do the problems. 10 of my points came from the 10-point bonus question. This exam was not too long at all; that gave me a good 40 minutes of uncomfortable thought, exploring the same mathematical dead-ends over and over again. Can I still pass the class? Hopefully. I still usually feel like I can follow along, at least, in lectures, and I can kind-of do the psets (one of which I will be attacking as soon as I finish this post; they're due Monday mornings, ugh). However, I may take Professor Kemp up on that meeting offer, now (I didn't, after the first exam, because I did much better than I'd expected after walking out of Walker), and I'll see where things go from then.

Now I know, and I really know -- I don't just hear people say it -- that failure is something you'll have to get used to at MIT. The fact that this wasn't as crushing to me as my above-average performance on the first exam says that, at least a little, it's something I'm learning to deal with (gasp, ending in a preposition; I wonder if a tacky parenthetical fixes that? meh).

However, my crazy exam week didn't end there. I'm taking both 18.022 and 8.012; the extra digit indicates they're "harder" versions of the standard freshman classes, Calc 2 and Physics 1, respectively. I would say that 18.022 and 8.012 are definitely my hardest classes. On Tuesday morning, I walked to physics lecture for the first time in weeks. We had a test coming up on Thursday, and so I thought I'd go to the lecture before the test to make sure I had been roughly keeping pace with the class. On the way into building 6, I joked with Christie and Paul, two other freshmen, that I hoped we could still recognize people in the class; it'd been a long time since any of us had sat through a lecture.

With nothing but a laptop under my arm and the clothes I was wearing, I walk into the physics room.

Christie: "why does everybody have papers on their desks?"

....oh, dang.

I took my 8.012 exam completely cold, not having been to lecture in (two) weeks, and not having studied at all. I had little idea what the exam would even cover, and yet I walked in there and took it as if I'd prepared all weekend; at that point, there's no use in panicking. I asked Professor Zwierlein (another *awesome* lecturer; my (fairly recent) lack of attendance has had only to do with the 9AM time slot for the class) if I might borrow a pencil, and he looked at me like I was absolutely mad.

An hour and half later, I walked out of that room and promptly burst into laughter. When asked how I thought I'd done, I said "between a 0 and a 90"; it felt like I had played some kind-of paper-based form of Russian roulette.

That night, I received the following e-mail:

Results for the second midterm exam are online - please click on the "Gradebook" link in the left menu panel on the 8.012 homepage.

Statistics for the exam scores are as follows:

mean: 71
standard deviation: 20

There were two perfect scores (100+10 bonus).

And the following results (out of 100 points, even though it says 110):

....w00t.

So, you can't win them all. But you can at least win a few :)

Now, that 18.022 pset.

Till next time,
-Cam

Oh, P.S.: I may have sprained or broken my foot yesterday; I have an x-ray tomorrow morning. Either way, blog posts may be about things closer to my dorm room, for the next few weeks.

...Oh, and I'm pumped to go to 8.012 lectures again, because I think we're starting to study gyroscopes -- score.

[Begin Time Travel]
(^ one of my many talents -- surprise! And yet another something that's probably only offered at MIT.)

Hey all,

No school is perfect. At college and in high school, you get occasional weeks where things just don't line up properly; your workload is far more than you're used to or should be used to, and things hit you one after another. Last week, I had three midterm tests in three of my classes, and an essay due in my fourth class. All of this happened within four consecutive days.

Ow.

I got through it okay, and emerged at 6AM Saturday morning (okay, the essay was a small number of hours late.... whoops) tired and ready for a break. At that point, I'd already received most of my grades and was no longer thinking about the results of the tests; I was just concerned with relaxing for the weekend before diving back into the school routine. Fortunately, we had a three day weekend.

What does this mean?

It means it's a Jewish holiday! Oh, wait, no it doesn't. I don't get those days off from school anymore. Okay, so it's Columbus Day. Same thing, to non-Jewish me. (Sorry if I offended any of you devout Columbus followers with that last remark; hope you all had a great Columbus Day! Spoiler alert: he discovers America.)

Ok, let's try that again: What does this mean?

It means you have a long weekend in which to get away from MIT! (Something that all you young folk and eager applicants may not want to do, but probably will want very much once you get here. Everybody needs the occasional vacation from MIT's ridiculous workload.)

Since we knew a three day weekend was coming up, my friends and I tried to plan something fun and off campus. However, many people had fraternity retreats -- I think many of the fraternities had retreats that weekend. Lame, right? (Just kidding -- I have nothing against fraternities. However, I decided this year that joining a fraternity would not be a good fit for me.) Anyway, with all the fraternities away on retreats, all of us non-Greek-life students (hence the title; yeah, I apologize for that one) were stuck on campus. This left us with only one good option: make our own retreat!

One advantage of being a local: I can go home to get things. Sometimes that means I can go home and grab my winter jacket and an extra pair of pants, but this weekend it meant I went home on Saturday night and borrowed the car.

Meet Lucy, my wonderful 11-year-old Ford Explorer. Note: this picture is not from this weekend.
(Fyi, the 1998 Ford Explorer is the best car ever made.)

Somehow, on Friday night, we decided that we would go to Cape Cod on Sunday for a picnic on the beach. Cape Cod is one of Massachusetts' more popular vacation spots, with a slew of beaches and overpriced stores. As a local, I've been to the Cape a number of times, so I was confident that we could get down there and back in a day. After some asking around and browsing google maps, we decided on a trip out to Sandwich, MA for our mini-retreat. Saturday night we went to Shaw's and bought food for our picnic. We ended up with a healthy helping of pasta, a sadly bimodal fruit salad (in which I imply that fruit is a continuous spectrum?), chips, salsa, and -- for dessert -- pumpkin bread and milanos. Add some apple cider and cream soda to the mix, stuff it into a small dorm-sized mini-fridge for the night, and you've got yourself a wonderful vacation in the making.

Sunday morning we planned to leave at 9, which meant that we all woke up just before 9 and hit the road by 9:30; however, traffic wasn't bad and we still found our way down in about an hour.

Christie, Michele, and Erin enjoying (or at least pretending to enjoy) our mid-October picnic on the beach.

Dessert!

This entry peters off a bit here, because we didn't do anything particularly exciting once we got to the beach; it was just relaxing, which was the point of the day. I, as an amateur photography dork, took some time to play around with my camera (the amazing Canon EOS 40D, for all you other nerds), leading to the artsy portrait shots below; other than that, we mostly ate, skipped rocks, and relaxed. It was as any good vacation should be -- relaxing, and not too much more.

I took a lot of time taking pictures, so I'll just bombard you and let those speak for me. (The blogger's excuse to be lazy and fill up a lot of space)

Artsy angles!

Professional-like!

"Relaxing". Erin, thanks for the camerawork :)

And then it was time to leave.

Goodbye rocks, ocean, and awkwardly shaped birds (we had no idea what kind of birds they were).

We made one stop on the way home; three or four minutes away was the Sandwich Glassblowing Museum (in fact, one reason for our choice of picnicing in Sandwich. It had nothing to do with the foody name of the place). I took a whole bunch of pictures, but showing you them would probably ruin the point of going to the museum -- it's really visually impressive, and is a nice walk-through for $5. I'd definitely recommend it. We skipped out on the glassblowing demonstrations that occur every hour on the hour, because we'd all seen it before.

Oh, score! A connection to MIT. I guess I'm at least kind-of writing about the right thing here, right? Accidentally doing my job, lookit that.

All of us were in the same FPOP -- Freshman Pre-Orientation Program. These programs bring students (I think over half the freshman class enrolled in FPOPs) to campus (or elsewhere, like Yellowstone -- any blogger in that one, want to write about it?) four or five days early for something a little like summer camp. For most of the day, you're with your FPOP. The FPOPs are led by a group consisting of faculty and students in a certain major, and it is their job to take a cadre of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshmen and to simultaneously introduce them to MIT and to a major. We all enrolled in the DMSE FPOP -- Discover Materials Science and Engineering (Course 3, since we number our majors here) -- which meant that our days were filled with tours of course 3 labs, lectures from famous course 3 professors (and an awesome grad student or two), explorations around campus, and excursions into Boston. One day, during our FPOP, we went down to MIT's glassblowing lab for a demonstration: we got to see them blow and roll beautiful glass pumpkins for their annual charity event. Following that, we got to try our hands at blacksmithing (gee, where have you heard about that before?) and metalcasting; all told, it made a very convincing case for course 3.

Anyway, long story short, we'd already seen a glassblowing demonstration and so decided not to hang around for another one in Sandwich.

I bought a glass penguin. w00t.

By 6:30pm, we were back on campus, and all promptly went back to our dorms to nap for several hours.

The End.

[End Time Travel]

Also, note how I just barely manage to stay on the front page.

(Sorry, I had to. It's the classic "first program" for any new language, and ... ok, fine, it doesn't apply to admissions blogs (although perhaps they do have a language of their own), but I wanted to start off that way regardless.)

I'm Cam, your newest (and slowest, but I'll see what I can do about that) admissions blogger. I think that means that it's my job to tell you about MIT, the things I do here (or don't do here), and generally what my life's like (so that you can, I don't know, decide whether or not you'd like to apply here for school). Since applying to college is an important process for many people, and I'm not quite sure how to represent the enormous beast that is MIT, I figured I'd start off with something smaller and lighter.

Such as a large steel fork.

Smaller and lighter than your choice of where to apply to college, but bigger and heavier than most of the other forks you've used.

Why am I telling you about a steel fork?

Well, at Lame-vard University, studying for your degree in Something Lame, you might have freshman classes like:

• Boring 101
• Honors Boring
• How to Be Pretentious
• Polo Shirts
• (Intro to) Gee, my classes are boring

At MIT, fortunately, that's not quite the case. (And of course, the jab above is all in good fun -- I have no problem with polo shirts, and in fact own several)

Every Monday night, I get to put on pants*, step back from a crazy work-filled day, and sweat for several hours.

Sounds fun, right?

*(Keep reading, it'll make sense)

At MIT, all freshmen have the option to apply for a "freshman advising seminar". All students (or, most? I'm new here) have an advisor, the professor or faculty member who helps you to manage your schedule, get a job, adjust to college, and discover cold fusion. However, if you elect to take a freshman advising seminar, you also spend a few hours a week with your advisor and a few other students doing something Really Cool. I am one of the lucky four freshmen in the advising seminar 3.A04, Modern Blacksmithing and Physical Metallurgy.

!!

At 7pm on Monday nights, I change into long pants and close-toed shoes and head down to the basement of building 4. There, I work for two and a half hours with my two awesome advisors, Professor Sam Allen and Technical Instructor Mike Tarkanian. This means I don't get to watch House when it airs every week, but this seminar is worth the sacrifice. We start most nights with a demonstration, since both Sam and Mike are fairly accomplished smiths, and then we all get to work on our own projects. Since I've only been to three sessions so far, having had some kind of flu (probably the oink-oink type) during my first week, I'm still not working on anything too exciting. One of the demonstration pieces was a two-tined fork, and I decided to try and tackle that for a starter project. However, I decided to try for three tines.

As you can see above, my fork's lacking in general forkiness. I'm not quite done with it; I still need to finish the tapers on all three points, and then I will bend them to point in the fork-hat direction (oh, by the way: the first few weeks of freshman classes involve A Lot of Vectors). After that, I will touch up the handle and clean the whole thing, perhaps coating it with varnish. Then I will use this absurdly large and heavy fork for something excellent, like stabbing (and subsequently cooking) steaks.

I had hoped to finish the fork this week, but ran into a bit of a problem on Monday night.

As I was cutting out the tines in the fork, having annealed the steel (we learn actual science, in my freshman seminar! not just: heat heat bang bang. It's pretty cool) so that I could actually make ~1.5" cuts in it, I broke a hacksaw. The old blade I was using decided it wanted to go into early retirement, and snapped off the hacksaw... somehow, slicing open my pinky as I came down on top of it.

So, that's all, folks: stay tuned for my next post, on How to Sue MIT for Millions of Dollars!

Just kidding. My finger's fine, and I still can't wait for next Monday when I turn this lump of three-tined steel into a manly meat-stabbing utensil, or something along those lines.

In summary, though, I would highly recommend taking a freshman seminar if or when you come to MIT. Although this seminar was the only one that I applied for, there are many of them available, and you can apply for the freshman seminar(s) of your choice through an online lottery over the summer (there were other cool ones (pun!), but I wasn't willing to make the time commitment to them, as I'm taking (what I consider to be) fairly hard classes (extremely run-on paragraph! plus ten points!)).

I'm sorry it took me so long to get a first post out; I was waiting until Monday to take pictures for this, and then I didn't get the post out until Thursday because I had three midterms in three days. Sometimes, scheduling doesn't work out very well. As one of the new admissions bloggers, I'm still getting used to this "blogging routine" concept (although that's no excuse), but I hope you all enjoyed reading this post, and I'll be back with another one soon, so stay tuned!

-Cam

A picture which I did not successfully work into the body of the post.